There once was a man who so loved Yocco's hot dogs that he was laid out in his casket with a six-pack of them, or at least with the box they came in, along with a can of the Pepsi-Cola that always accompanied his consumption of the iconic Allentown franks.

This story comes by way of Matthew Stephens, a third-generation funeral home operator who has moved his business from Allentown to the suburbs after his father and grandfather, both named Stanley, spent 74 years memorializing the departed at 1335 W. Linden St.

It was time. The Linden Street home had been pieced together over the years, starting in a twin home and expanding into four adjoining properties. And even though it was a handsome, warm and welcoming place for the bereaved, it had some disadvantages. Parking, for instance, is always at a premium in the city, and the streets around the funeral home were no exception.

Now, the business is at 274 N. Krocks Road in Upper Macungie Township, on a 4-acre property at the intersection with Cetronia Road and not far from Resurrection Cemetery.

The new campus is open for business, after a long winter of weather-related delays, though it isn't entirely finished even yet — the recent heavy rains put the construction of a Colonial Williamsburg-style garden behind schedule.

But the building is done, and Matthew Stephens offered a tour the other day to show off some of the amenities that gave a glimpse of the nature of the funeral business today — a complex choreography of commerce, sympathy and storytelling in which the departed can be remembered humorously, as with the Yocco's fan, or more somberly.

It's the task of the staff to tease out the proper approach from families dealing with losses that in some cases were long-expected but in others struck out of the blue.

"Everyone has a story to share," said Stephens, who employs a group of writers to condense lifetimes into brief but rich narratives distributed to funeral-goers.

It's a demanding business. In Allentown, the home held 200 to 225 funerals per year over the past few years.

"You have to be patient, sympathetic and personal," Stephens said, crediting his father with teaching him the gift of observation and attention to detail that undergirds a proper memorial.

Like everything else these days, the new home has a technological component — live-streaming of services for friends and relatives who can't travel, for example — but also a good dose of the old-fashioned touches that made the original home a popular farewell spot for generations.

"This alcove was built just for the clock," Stanley Stephens Jr. said, standing in the lobby in front of an 8-foot-tall, century-old grandfather clock that was a mainstay on Linden Street and made the journey to Upper Macungie, along with his father's original office door, several tables, mirrors and other furniture.

What couldn't be moved was re-created.

"We replicated the staircase that in the old home went up to grandma and grandpa's apartment," Matthew Stephens said, running his finger along the decorative woodwork cut into the same pattern as the staircase that took Stanley Stephens Sr. to dinner and bed each night.

For Allentown, losing a business that had been a downtown mainstay since 1941 isn't nearly as painful as it might have been at one time, given the development boom that has transformed so much of Center City in the past few years.

The Linden Street property is on the outskirts of the tax-incentive zone that is fueling the city's rebirth. It could draw a lot of buyer interest as development expands, but Matthew Stephens said the family has no firm plans for it.

That's the last thing on anyone's mind now as the family prepares to sink its roots deep into the new location. Funeral homes are called that because they try to replicate as much as possible the experience of visiting a home, not a business, and that includes becoming part of the neighborhood.

After all, funerals are like weddings in that they bring together relatives who might otherwise seldom see each other, thanks to the relative rootlessness of society today. So Stephens, like its counterparts, is full of warm paintings, soothing lights, comfortable chairs. There's even a dog, a golden retriever named Sammy, who likes to stretch out in front of the fireplace. It's all as homey as can be.

Make no mistake, though. The funeral business is very much a business, and an essential part of the economic landscape. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, about 70,000 people are employed by some 20,000 funeral homes in the United States, as service managers, morticians, undertakers, embalmers, directors and attendants.

Most of these homes are like Stephens: small, family-run affairs passed down through generations. Stanley Stephens Jr. said some large corporations — the ones that already control the major components of the $15 billion a year funeral industry, such as the production of caskets and memorial stones — are moving into the funeral service end.

"But it's the traditional family ones that succeed," he said.

That's surely the case in the Lehigh Valley, where many funeral homes boast long histories. Trexler Funeral Home in Allentown, for instance, traces its founding to 1860, with ownership passing through nephews and uncles and in-laws and then to a new owner who was himself a fourth-generation director. Other familiar names — Heintzelman, Weber — have been hanging outside the same buildings for decades.

Matthew Stephens wasn't a sure bet to follow his father into the business. He thought he might become an athletic director.

But it must have been in his blood. Entirely by coincidence — or was it? — he married a woman named Eva, which was his grandmother's name. And he happily discovered how well he had absorbed his father's tutelage about paying attention to people and their stories.

"I saw the ministry that he provided to the community," Stephens said. "I was truly blessed to have the best teacher out there."

Will it continue as a family trade? Stephens' sons, Nate and Taylor — two of his five children — were working at the home last week.

Nate was the one who suggested acquiring Sammy, a trained therapy dog. He was inspired by news accounts of such dogs comforting people after the Sandy Hook school shootings.

"I just thought it would be wonderful to have for families, to come and console them and the children as well," he said, sounding very much like his father's son and his grandfather's grandson.

• Stephens Funeral Home will hold an open house at its new facility from 1-4 p.m. June 14. The home is at 274 N. Krocks Road in Upper Macungie Township.

• Cremation rates vary widely across the country. In Pennsylvania, the rate is just under 50 percent. In Nevada, it's just under 90 percent.

• Walmart has a piece of the funeral business. It sells caskets and cremation urns through its website, including ones bearing the logo of every Major League Baseball team. In keeping with the company's status as the discount giant, casket prices range from $1,000 to $4,000.

• Brendan Behan, the Irish writer, thought Americans did a disservice to the dead by eschewing old-world tradition and handing their final disposition over to strangers. In a story he writes about the occupant of a casket: "I fancied her face looking up from the open coffin, on the Americans who, having imported wakes from us, invented morticians themselves."

• The National Home Funeral Alliance would consider Behan an ally. It offers resources for people who want to care for their dead at home with "environmentally sound and culturally nurturing death practices."

• George Swanson of Hempfield Township, Westmoreland County, was buried in 1994 in a one-of-a-kind coffin — his 1984 white Corvette.